<p>55>[link]Since I ran out of room in my newest story portfolio, I decided to use one of my heavy duty sketch pads. I got tired of the old 8 1/2 X 11 size and having all the illustrations confined within each frame and decided to make the picture larger and have some activity going on in the margins. There's six more pages to do after this one then I'm finally done with this chapter. Mostly I used colored pencil with just a touch of pen and acrylic.

I'd seen this in the "mini picture view" of my DA Messages for a few days, but now that I look at it in full, I see that my guesses about what was going on were wrong (not spidery-webby-spaghetti thing coming to get her) --

I think it's awesome how water-like the water looks and feels (bubbles, strands, etc) despite the fact its behaving all gollywumpus!

Thanks. I had to Google a lot of pictures of water flowing just to find the right texture and effect. Now I'm going to have to study a lot of futuristic city architecture to get this realistic high-tech city setting.

Ah, I wondered why the faucet looked very functional but bizarre -- I'm guessing its an example of the futuristic setting? It should be fun to study and design the look of the futuristic setting, there's plenty of real(ish) and imagined examples to draw on (I remember some postcards of the futuristic architecture inside what I thought was the LA Museum of Art -- but while trying to confirm that just searching for the words: futuristic museum of art architecture had some interesting results).

I'm very excited because in the new pages of my comic, the characters are taking a bus into a fictional city -- so I basically get to design the whole city, or at least the pieces of it they'll be passing through, the chunks of skyline that can be seen in the background, and the pieces of it they'll reference. (Of course, I'm drawing pages about 20-30 ahead of what's being posted online every week, so the bus ride won't show up for a while, but it's a fun time).

Maybe I should Google the name of that museum and see what come up. Maybe I could get some inspirational scenes. I was just wondering about your futuristic vehicle designs--are these that ones that levitate like you see in movies like Bladerunner or The Fifth Element? You often run across that type of flying vehicle in movies and literature a lot.

Ah, miscommunication: the hallmark of what happens after I have tried to say something! Lemmie try to untangle the two points that I made really unclearly

I was googling that museum to see if I had a suggestion of places to look for weird, potentially futuristic-looking architecture,

yet separate from that, I'm stoked about building a city, more for the "there's THIS part of town where That kind of store/housing/buildings are, and its nickname is [something]". However my city's technology-level isn't even modern (I'm figuring roughly '80s/'90s, because to my mind when cellphones reach a saturation point such that any character can talk to any character at any time, it tends to cripple a lot of plot ). However, my story has always had bizarre para-psychological events/devices which tend more towards the technological side than any indication of 'magic' or ESP, (for example, [link] ) so, it's hard to say.

Irony the first: the only vehicle I've shown in the new city so far is a big boxy bus, as un-futuristic as it gets

Irony the second: I was reminded of The Fifth Element just yesterday, while I was drawing: there was a police truck pulled over a ways up the block, and after a while, the officer came out of McDonalds with a giant bag of food (presumably for him and his co-pilot); there's a similar scene where the floating police car is at a billboard/drive-through window in Fifth

Another good place for "pseudo-flying" vehicles is the movie, Minority Report -- its somewhere BEFORE flying technology is applied to cars, so the vehicles magnetically adhere to the massive strips of highway in the air, and go on auto-pilot to their destination...though sometimes they're traveling vertically or upside-down along the highway, I think the cabin inside rotates so the driver is never in an awkward position.

I kind of understand your choice of making the technology-level not too high tech. Sometimes the characters and plot get lost in the overwhelming setting of a futuristic story.

I really liked how you arranged the panels of the story so that they appeared to floating around into of being in a conventional cartoon style where the panels are in neat horizontal line. It really adds to the surrealism of the whole story.

Looking at the vehicles in Minority Report, they're at least grounded somewhat in reality because they're still attached to a surface instead of whizzing around in the air. When I was watching The Fifth Element, I wondered how the engine operated exactly and what they used as a fuel soar.

I'm glad you like the panel arrangement! The story is drawn quickly/on the go, as my focus (and abilities) are much more about plot and unspooling it moment-by-moment than about the drawing quality.

As far as trying to figure out the reasons behind the technology in The Fifth Element...the biggest drawback is that Fifth Element is, in many ways, a big dumb movie -- albeit one which I think is a lot of fun to watch and always a visual joy. (What's so sad is that so many other big dumb made since then are bigger and dumber but not even a fraction as enjoyable )